Biography Essay

Although best known to modern readers as the author of The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)—which T. S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers have called the best English detective story—Wilkie Collins made contributions more substantial than his current reputation indicates to the development of mystery and suspense fiction. As early as 1865 Henry James noted that Collins had "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors." Writing before the detective story had become established as a genre and before it had hardened into formula, Collins (like other mid-Victorian authors who emphasized secrecy, mystery, and crime in their fiction) was considered by contemporary reviewers a sensation novelist, and James's comment singles out an innovation crucial to the creation of modern suspense fiction. Sensation fiction, generally viewed as domestication of the Gothic romance, established an atmosphere of...